Origin of Animal-worship.
We now come to consider the special worship of certain animals. The origin of this form of belief may possibly be traced to many different sources.
In the first place, no savage fixes the boundary line between man and the lower forms of animal life so definitely as more civilized races are wont to do. The animal, in their belief, has very much the same soul, much the same feelings and passion as men have, a theory exemplified in the way the Indian ploughman speaks to his ox, or the shepherd calls his flock.
To him, again, the belief is familiar that the spirits of his ancestors appear in the form of animals, as among the Drâvidian races they come in the shape of a tiger which attacks the surviving relatives, or as a chicken which leaves the mark of its footsteps in the ashes when it re-visits its former home.
So, all these people believe that the witch soul wanders about at night, and for want of a better shape enters into some animal, takes the form of a tiger or a bear, or flies through the air like a bird.
All through folk-lore we find the idea that man has kinship with animals generally accepted. We constantly find the girl wooed by the frog, marrying the pigeon, elephant, eagle, or whale. Every child in the nursery reads of the frog Prince, and no savage sees any particular incongruity in his marriage and transformation. In more than one of the Indian tales the childless wife longs for a child and is delivered of a snake.
The incident of animal metamorphosis is also familiar. Thus, in one of Somadeva’s tales his mistress turns a man into an ox; in another his wife transforms him into a buffalo; in a third the angry hermit turns the king into an elephant.[1] Everyone remembers the terrific scene of transformation into various animals which makes up the tale of the second Qalandar in the Arabian Nights. Animals, too, constantly assume other shapes. In one of the Bengal stories the mouse becomes a cat. In other Indian tales the golden deer becomes the mannikin demon, the white hind becomes the white witch, the hero’s mother becomes a black bitch, the hero himself a parrot, and so on.[2] In fact a large part of the incidents of Indian stories turns on various forms of metamorphosis, and every English child knows how the lover of Earl Mar’s daughter took the shape of a dove.
We have again the very common incident in the folk-tales of animals understanding the speech of human beings, and men learning the tongue of birds, and the like. Solomon, according to the Qurân, knew the language of animals; in the tales of Somadeva, the Vaisya Bhâshâjna knows the language of all beasts and birds, a faculty which in Germany is gained by eating a white snake.[3]
Then there is the large cycle of tales in which the grateful animal warns the hero or heroine of approaching danger, as in the story of Bopuluchi, or brings news, or produces gold. The idea of grateful animals assisting their benefactors runs through the whole range of folk-lore.[4]
Another series of cognate ideas has been very carefully analyzed by Mr. Campbell. The spirits of the dead haunt two places, the house and the tomb. Those who haunt the house are friendly; those who haunt the tomb are unfriendly. Two classes of animals correspond to these two classes of spirits—an at-home, fearless class, as the snake, the rat, flies and ants and bees, into which the home-haunting or friendly spirits would go; and a wild, unsociable class, such as bats and owls, dogs, jackals, or vultures, into which the unfriendly or tomb-haunting spirits would go. In the case of some of these tomb-haunting animals, the dog, jackal, and vulture, the feeling towards them as tomb-haunters seems to have given place to the belief that as the spirit lives in the tomb where the body is laid, so, if the body be eaten by an animal, the spirit lives in the animal, as in a living tomb.[5]
Other animals, again, are invested with particular qualities, fierceness and courage, strength or agility, and eating part of their flesh, or wearing a portion as an amulet, conveys to the possessor the qualities of the animal. A familiar instance of this is the belief in the claws and flesh of the tiger as amulets or charms against disease and the influence of evil spirits.
Many animals, too, are respected for their use to man or as scarers of demons, as the cow; as possessors of wisdom, like the elephant or snake; as semi-human in origin or character, as the ape. But it is, perhaps, dangerous to attempt, as Mr. Campbell has done, to push the classification much farther, because the respect paid to any particular animal is possibly based on varied and diverging lines of belief.
Lastly, as Mr. Frazer has shown, many animals are regarded as representing the Corn spirit, and are either revered or killed in their divine forms to promote the return of vegetation with each recurring spring.